


To Die For

by Rachel24601



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Delightful, Desire, F/M, First Kiss, Food, Humor, Mild Sexual Content, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:55:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24897310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rachel24601/pseuds/Rachel24601
Summary: The Doctor decides to show Rose just how delicious infinity can get when you go to the right places. The universe is full of undreamt-of delicacies. But maybe what will fulfill both their insatiable desire is closest to home.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Kudos: 20





	To Die For

The cake crumbles inside her mouth and she closes her eyes as the savors melt on her tongue and multiply inside the closed cave of her palate.

“Well?”

His tone is expectant, and she knows she can’t reveal too much.

If she moans, beams, or betrays any sign of her ecstasy, he’ll know that he’s won.

She makes him wait. Pretends her eyes are closed in concentration instead of bliss. By the time she opens her mouth to speak, she’s enjoyed the last of the dying flavors on her tongue, both inimitable and undefinable – she’s never tasted anything like this before, doubts there even exists anything that compares to it in twenty-first-century England.

“Well,” she says, on a tone of detached observation. “It’s certainly _different_ from Ben and Jerry’s.”

The whole thing started a couple of days ago – or was it sooner than that? So hard to count the passing of days on the Tardis. Anyway, what she knows for sure is it happened after the rush of their latest adventure. More often than not, when they’ve brushed by a particularly gruesome death, or when their means of escape was especially narrow, they like to take an hour or so to chill in London, present time, to settle before they get back on the saddle.

As it happens, they were walking along the Thames, a pot of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream in their hands, when Rose crushed her eyelids together and let out a sigh so close to arousal, it immediately drew the Doctor’s eyes away from the river.

“My God, this is so good. I could just die.”

“Really?”

Maybe his brows arched higher than usual on account of the fact that they nearly had died, some half an hour ago, when the Tardis spiraled away from the claws of a dying planet just before they both got swallowed.

“Die?” He said. “For Ben and Jerry’s ice cream?”

“What? I’m not difficult, I. You give me that for my final meal, I’ll be pleased as punch.”

“ _Would_ you now?” He made a show of sounding outrage. “Well, Rose, really, I owe you an apology. Here I was, thinking the priority was showing you the most splendid sights time had to offer, when clearly I should have tried to give you a proper _feeding_ instead.”

“Oh, we’re being fussy now?”

He shook his head, with that look on his face he’d taken to wearing, ever since he’d changed – had metamorphosed into this new witty Doctor, who liked to tease, and act like she was a student who still had much to learn.

“I’ll bet you anything, Rose, _anything_ , that I can make that silly ice cream of yours taste like unsweetened porridge compared to some of my treats.”

“Anything?” She said. She could never resist teasing him back. “Careful, Doctor. Last time my parents said I could get anything I wanted for Christmas, my list for Santa Claus got very hard to shop for. There was a baby dragon, right at the top.”

But instead of raising a brow or displaying one of his shows of theatricals, the Doctor looked earnestly back at her and said, “Is there anything you wanted I ever failed to give you?”

His eyes glimmered so, with charming self-satisfaction, that she was tempted to take him by surprise, and answer, “You.”

But where would it take them? What if it launched him on a long lecture about their different natures again – he was immortal, she was not. He would lose her, in the end, one way or another; and so, in his book, it was unfair to make him love her.

More unfair, than for her to spend her whole life having her love denied because she was a speck of dust in the eternal existence of the man she wanted?

“All right.”

She entered his game, instead of forcing him to drop the masks, to look at her and really see her, see that she was not playing; that she had given herself to him from the moment that he’d taken her hand in his and there she lay, inside his palm, untouched, untaken.

“You’re on,” she said. “Rock my world, Doctor.”

But because he promised her _anything_ if he failed to deliver, she finds it’s rather tempting to lie – to pretend the new, unrivaled delicacy she’s tasting at this moment is no more spectacular than a plain old pot of ice cream.

“What is it, anyway.” She says, stalls for time, while eyeing at the rest of the cake he still holds before her.

Really, she doesn’t think ‘cake’ is the right word for it – in a way, it looks a little like a slice of gingerbread, except its color is so much richer, its texture indescribable. And the taste – well, she simply isn’t equipped with the right words.

And how on earth _could_ she be?

They’re in Indonesia, in the year three thousand. Probably, the ingredients that were used in making that ‘cake’ don’t even exist where she’s from.

He confirms this when he says, “It’s the national dessert – well, what will become the national dessert around the mid twenty-seventh century. By then, your kind will have come up with a new way of creating sugar and amplifying all sorts of flavors. There’s some fifty-year-old rhubarb in this.”

The cake is shaped roughly like a muffin, small enough that the Doctor can raise it to his eyeline and look at it while he speaks, like it’s a fascinating specimen, the fossil of a dead bird or something.

“So?” He looks more serious now, still fooled, she thinks, by her visible lack of interest. “What about the aftertaste? Isn’t it remarkable? Doesn’t it just revolutionize your whole appetite for pleasure?”

Rose rolls her lips together. Now, her mouth is getting dry and she finds she’s craving more of what he gave her – it’s the cake she wants, she tells herself. _Sure_. And he, looking at it without the least hint of temptation, like it’s a mere rock, something worthy of study.

Without warning, Rose feels a wave of anger rush through her.

Is that why he does it? Why he wanders around the universe with young, impressable and ordinary girls like her – to show them wonders that have lost their glimmer to his own eyes, for which he has no hunger?

_I’m the ice cream_ , she thinks. That old vanilla flavor. And he’s the exotic new treat, the ungraspable excitement, dangling before my eyes, teasing me with a taste, but no more. Never more.

She looks away.

“What’s wrong?”

Though she can’t see the frown on his face, she catches the chillness that seeps into his tone.

“Nothing,” she lies. Feels angry instead of sad, but of course, that’s just how she is. Rose’s tears are always rage – she isn’t one to dwell on maudlin moments, to allow sorrow to set in even for a brief stay. There are some whose pain buds into pretty tears; but not Rose. Her pain screams.

Which is why she can’t have it, has learned to keep a firm check on it.

“Nothing,” she repeats. “I’m bored. Let’s get out of here.”

“But you can tell me –”

“What, it’s not what you want?” Her eyes stare fiercely at him. She can read the surprise on his face, and the slight ridiculousness now of the cake in his hand. “Just fly on to our next adventure? What else is there, right, if it can’t get _real_? So let’s just go, Doctor. I think I’ve seen enough of your _delicacies_.”

“Hey now, what are you –”

“Like you don’t know.”

“Can’t a bloke finish his sentence?”

“Nah, just leave it hang loose, with all the ends flying in mid-air. There’s never an _end_ with you, anyway, is there?”

She falls silent, conscious of the smoldering anger rising into his face.

It’s not the first time Rose has seen the Doctor angry, but it’s the first time she’s _made_ him angry.

She doesn’t wait for him to tell her to say what she means. The imperative is looming unavoidably over them, and she knows there’s no chance that they’ll just walk back to the Tardis without saying anything more about this.

“I was honest with you,” he said. “From the beginning, I was honest. I told you I’d show you things you’d never forget, things that’d take you millions of years from life as you knew it. I said you were welcome for the ride as long as you wanted it, and you _are_. What’s changed, Rose? Isn’t it what you want now?”

“Do you ever pause to _think_ ,” she fumes, “in your great wisdom, what it does to me – to a human,” generalizing feels safer, “to see all the things you’ve seen, to brush by the treasures of eternity, when you can never have it? To – to have a taste of something you could never think of in your wildest dreams, but know it can never be yours for the taking?”

“It’s –”

“You’re a _tease_.”

She can’t stop herself now. Never mind that she keeps interrupting him, never mind that his eyes are blazing with fever.

“And if you’re just going to take this away – how am I supposed to ever care about anything? If you’re going to leave me behind wasted and ruined –”

Then he’s the one to interrupt her.

His hands grip firmly at her shoulders as he pulls her in, draws her face one inch from his own.

Rose stops breathing.

She doesn’t know when he’s let go of the cake, but she can still smell its elusive flavors on his fingers, as she supposes he must smell it on her breath.

“Did I say that? Did I _say_ I would leave you, Rose? Did you think I was just waiting until I got bored? That I would drop you off like last night’s newspaper?”

She swallows.

In the heat of his proximity, she is aware of absolutely everything her body does, every breath she takes in, every sigh she releases.

“I _don’t_ choose, Rose.” The words taste like fire as they break against her lips. “I never choose. Was it wrong of me that I wanted you to know your options? That I didn’t want you – didn’t want you losing your life on me, when there’s so much I can’t give you?”

She never thinks of crushing her lips against his until after she’s done it, and his silence beats into her like the undeniable proof of her insanity.

The taste of him is like that slice of cake plucked straight from the maws of another time, a world she doesn’t belong in. Not sweet, or salty. _Other_.

And after a while – when he doesn’t pull away, but clutches her against him, and sinks his hand into her blond hair – it actually stops feeling insane, that they’re doing this.

Her lips break from his in a wet pop. Again, she isn’t aware of a conscious plan to do it. But the look on his face is so deep and sore from her parting already, she knows she must say it quick – whatever she means to say.

“ _I_ choose,” she says. “This. You. For now. For always.”

There’s time for her to see how his eyes burn before she bridges the distance between them again and kisses hungrily at his lips, whose Sphinx-like smile always seemed to be amused at things light-years away from her.

A whole lifetime flashes her by while they remain like this, pressed against each other. Everything outside the span of their embrace seems to fall out of existence, just dwindles away, fades into the distant shore of her life – year 2005, England, planet earth.

They must have been stepping back a little, though she’s unaware of any movement that doesn’t have to do with her reaction to his body, and she utters a startled cry as she feels her shoe sink into some soft, nondescript substance –

They both look down, eyes sparkling when they notice she’s stepped on the wondrous cake she’s had only time for one bite of.

Their eyes meet again, amused.

“That wasn’t expensive, was it? Like – caviar, or something?”

“Oh,” he shrugs, “just food, Rose. The cook owed me a favor – anyway. Should I go back for more?”

But she grabs his hand so firmly he understands immediately the only place he’s going is the Tardis, with her.

**Author's Note:**

> I had the best of times writing this. Some crack and fluff and intense Rose/Ten is all I need right now for a good day ;). Share your thoughts in the comment section. I’d love to know your thoughts.


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